For the past four years, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has been searching for Earth-size planets orbiting Sun-like stars in the “habitable zone”—where liquid water could exist on a planet and perhaps support alien biology. Exquisitely precise monitoring of 200,000 stars has revealed more than 2700 probable planets, of which 122 have been independently confirmed. The most recent discoveries include a planetary system with five planets, of which two are in the habitable zone, and have diameters of 1.4 and 1.7 times that of Earth. Dr. Jenkins will also give a brief overview of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), NASA’s next mission to detect Earth’s closest cousins.